FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to an arm assembly for a disk drive device, in which a plurality of arms are stacked on each other, one end of each of the arms is fixed to each other, and the other end of the arms supports a read/write head, and relates to a method for fabricating the arm assembly.
A magneto resistive (MR) head has been used as a read/write head of a disk drive device. The MR head requires four connecting wires. As the number of data recording disks is increased, and a size of the disk drive device becomes small, a wiring process for connecting the four wires of each of the MR heads to pads on a flexible cable becomes time consuming work. FIG. 1 shows a wiring process of a prior disk drive device. As an example, three rotating data recording disks 1, and six arms 2 each of which supports a head/slider assembly 3 are shown. The four discrete connecting wires 4 of the MR head mounted in the head/slider assembly 3 are covered by a tube 5, and the four wires are connected to pads 6 on a flexible cable 7, respectively. Since a width W.sub.F of the flexible cable is very small in a recent disk drive device, the pads 6 are arranged in two columns, and the four wires 4 of the first arm 2 are connected to the four pads 6 in the first column, the four wires 4 of the second arm 2 are connected to the four pads 6 in the second column, and so on. The wires 4 are manually positioned to the pads 6, and connected by solder.
The prior structure as shown in FIG. 1 has caused the following problems. A first problem is that the manual wiring process is a time consuming job, and it increases the fabrication cost of the disk drive device, and the reliability of the entire electrical connection is lowered. A second problem is that since the MR head is easily damaged by electrostatic charges, the wiring should be made with great care. A third problem is that it is difficult to replace a bad MR head with a new MR head since the connections of the discrete wires 4 to the pads 6 are made in the small connecting space.